FATE Playtest Notes: Old habits, Boss Monsters, and Turtling

We did a wrap-up session last night for our unfinished FATE game, and this time it was a little less crazy and a little more subdued, but we still had fun. We did notice a couple things:

Old Habits!

One of our players started with, "...so I wait for a car to approach the building's parking garage..."

Not really FATE in a way. I as a referee waited for the player to announce the story action and none came. In a typical RPG, this sort of 'open ended wait for the referee to give me a bone' is a pretty normal thing. In FATE, you need to remember you are narrating a part of the story. What works better?

"When a car drives into the corporate parking garage, I sneak in alongside it, out of the driver's view and the security guard, creeping and walking fast along the opposite side of the vehicle."

Better. You are narrating a part of the movie scene and the skill being used (stealth) is obvious. Me, as a referee still needs to decide if a car comes or not, but in this case cars are coming and going all day so that fact will likely push the difficulty a step easier for the players. Fewer cars? Fewer chances and higher difficulty. No cars? I inform the player to try something else.

Remember our 'actions are better as macro events' feeling about the Star Wars RPG from Fantasy Flight? The same applies here. You don't want to aggregate too much into one roll, but you want the rolls to cover more than a turn-by-turn fine-grained breakdown of every action.

If an event has a chance of going wrong, and it requires a different skill set, make it a separate roll. If it is inconsequential, or you are finding you are making too many rolls for a single event (just to throw sand in the gears of the players), stop it, declare one last roll to clean up, and move on to the next story part.

You can focus 'too much' on one part of the story and slow things down by requiring too many rolls. As a referee, you need to be a little more aware of pacing and not punishing great ideas by layering on too many rolls on the implementation.

Boss Difficulty

When four players focus in on your bad guy, please make sure your bad guy is significantly more skilled and capable than an average starting character. You players can 'pile on' with their best skills, and a character equal to one of them is going to go down fast.

A big part of this game is building challenges, and players know when to pile on, drain an opponent's fate points dry, and finish the bad guy off with merciless abandon. I am trying to come up with guidelines on how tough to make a bad guy, but it is going to take some more time with the game and practice.

Our bad guy went down quick when all of the characters were focused on him and not fighting each other. Next time, I will need to give my bad guy a larger fate point pool and some defenses against a couple common attacks (mental and physical). Mental attacks, especially from an enemy unaware of the manipulation, can be very effective and drain a bad guy's defenses quickly.

One Trick Turtles

We saw a tendency to 'one trick pony' characters with their best skills in situations where they were protected against having to make skill checks in less-optimal skills. Of course, this came about with a great plan, but you don't want a game to devolve into 'I am the hacker and sit off in a remote site while I hack and stay immune to any risk.'

You want players in the facility, on the site, and taking risks. You want them sneaking through the enemy base. You want to force players out of their 'this is my +5 skill' box where all they do is sit there and roll that +5 skill when the proper time comes up.

As a player, don't turtle up! As a referee, discourage turtling!

The computer terminal you need to use is inside the building, past defenses and in an area patrolled by guards. You need to be using a couple other skills to get in and get out, and you those will likely be not your best ones either.

A great plan tends to put experts in places they need to be. But don't ignore the fact that getting these experts where they need to be should require a wide and diverse array of efforts. Create challenge by forcing characters out of their 'easy boxes' and into dangerous places.

More Playtesting Ahead

We are not done, but FATE looks like a solid game in our schedule of things we play. One of the things we love about the game are aspects and consequences, and we keep coming back to  those and seeing how other game worlds would benefit from having such a system. A lot of games out there are really 'cut and dried' where you just need to burn down a pile of defenses and hit points to 'win' and there really isn't any sort of control over temporary or long-term effects inside the narrative (other than GM fiat). FATE gives the players some input, and also forces the referee to consider what happens next because something else happened.

It really is an interesting system of storytelling and consequences that has captured our imagination.

FATE: Playtest Post

I have never laughed so hard since I played the classic Paranoia RPG in the mid-1980s.

So we did a playtest of the FATE Core System last night and we had an absolute blast, we had players having characters laying down aspects on the bad guys, and then in a moment of pure backstabbing greatness, on each other.

For a group of self-centered con-men and thieves trying to pull off the ultimate heist like something out of TNT's Leverage series, this was an absolute blast. At one point the mastermind of the caper was talked into killing off the band of criminals working under him he put together - by the bad guy they were trying to steal from.

"You work for me now."

Madness ensured.

Fun was had by all.

Not for Stat Crunchers

One thing to remember is FATE is not really a system for those who like their +1 longsword, AC 18, +6 initiative modifier, and 17 hit points. It is not that type of game. Your character's story, skills, and special 'stunts' are not there for singular "did you break down the door" type skill rolls, they are there to measure how much your actions impact the flow of the narrative.

And the narrative means the story itself, the room you are in, the situation around you, and even the stories and backgrounds of other characters with you - good or bad. The illustration on the cover of the book is a bit misleading, you may think this is a game about being that magic-wielding spy, samurai thief, or gorilla monk kung-fu guy - but it is not a game of personal min-maxing power at all. This is a game about how "whatever your power is" can push a story forward, sideways, or backwards and have a blast doing it no matter which way things go.

It is really a freeform "story simulator" and it excels in letting players delightfully mess things up for everyone at the table, good guys and bad guys included - and even your own character should you wish to take a setback for a couple extra hero points (so you can mess with things a little later in the scene). Yes, you will even find reasons to set your own character back if it advances the story in a way, or gets your character captured so you can finally be taken to the villain's secret lair.

You will start your own brand of trouble once you are there, trust me.

This is hard to simulate in a traditional style of pen-and-paper without a lot of GM fiat or "it is written into the module that you get captured" sort of stuff going on. Here? No, there are times you crave being set back because it opens the door to more trouble. We had a character try to sneak into the evil corporation's high rise fortress only to blow the roll spectacularly, where I instantly ruled, "...and they walk you into the evil CEO's office and say look who we caught trying to sneak in...."

And the player smiled in glee because "he was in" anyways, and then proceeded to go about his nefarious original plan when the bad guy offered up a new angle, and the player smiled at the chance to backstab all of the other players around the table with a double-cross.

And after an entertaining attempt of this player trying to eliminate the other high-tech thieves around the table with multiple chances to eliminate players, a devious triple-cross plan was formed and we are back at square one-hundred with the traitor serving as a part of the plan to pull off the biggest back-stab the world has ever seen on the evil CEO.

Oh, and now the evil CEO has devised a plan to tap all the city's phones and search for the player's characters throughout the city by monitoring every electronic device.

This was a simple heist. Get in the building's computer room, steal the plans, and get out.

The game has turned into a cross between Christopher Nolan Batman movie, The Exorcist, and The Matrix.

And we love it.

Player Directed Energy

So if you think about this game as "stats drive narrative" you begin to get it. We walked into this game thinking "traditional rules light game" and we were wrong. While the game itself has rules-light elements, there is a structure there around the basic four actions in the game (and subcategories of rules that control them) that is pure genius. You have to wrap your head around these concepts a little to get started, and about halfway through our first session it clicked.

You are not using "strength" to "bust down a door," you are using your strength to push the narrative along by busting down a door. You may additionally create an aspect (situation) for the scene stating "everyone suddenly ears the door crashing down" and use that short-term story-changer to your benefit. Or someone else may use it for their benefit.

You could use it to shock the group of baddies in the room on the other side into inaction.

They could use it to sound the alarm for help.

Someone nearby could use it to figure out where you are.

But the concept is the players use the situation, modify it, take advantage of it, or succumb to it (for their benefit) to create player-directed energy into the center of the table. This is not a one-way game where the referee tells the players what happens next. The players have direct input into what happens next, what is going on, and where the flow of the story is moving next. You may think in a traditional game this would be the case, if the players weren't in the goblin-infested tower rescuing the princess "they are driving the narrative!"

But in reality, they are not. They are playing through the referee's narrative and moving along a set path of events laid out in the adventure. Even if the adventure is free form, the only impact the players have on the story is through the result of skill and attack rolls.

In FATE, you lay down aspects of varying lengths of time on the story, create them, use them up, let them expire, or create long-lasting ones called consequences that stay in play for the entire adventure.

You make rolls with your skills to stir the pot, add new ingredients to it, and change the nature of the soup. The goal is not individual, atomic success that accumulates towards a conclusion. Here, you and your friends are aiming at changing the story through your individual skills and specialties. This game is not about winning X number of battles, collecting treasure, getting XPs and levels, and defeating the final boss.

Here, every player is a gamemaster in a way when it comes to writing the story together The players' stats rate how good they are at changing and adapting to the story. The gamemaster plays the bad guys, lays out the combined narrative, and is the final decider on how all this chaos comes together.

Silly, but also Serious

And we walked away realizing this is not just a silly party game. You could dial down the insanity a couple notches and have a really serious and satisfying game where you play spies, gangsters, space explorers, horror adventures, or any other sort of normal situation with normal characters. There would still be that subtle 'change the story' thing hovering around there in the background, but it would be used in different ways.

In a horror game, your character may suffer a consequence 'afraid to go in the basement' as a result of being scared by a sudden shock.

In a gangster game, your character could start a soup kitchen with some illegally gained dough and gain a 'loved by the working class and poor of the neighborhood' aspect.

In a spy game, you could talk an enemy agent into 'mistrusting a trusted source' of information and gain an advantage in a situation where that information becomes critical to the mission.

You can dial this down and play it straight. The characters do not need to be fate-alerting gods of chaos, and the insanity can be set at a manageable but still realistic level. It was a strange and sobering moment for us, that there was actually 'more there there' after a night where we laughed our heads off at the potential and insanity of what we just experienced. It was one of those door-opening moments for us that we experienced a few times, like when we first played role-playng games and realized 'you can do that?'

Here, with the narrative and story, yes, 'you can do that.'

Some Mental Assembly Required

As noted, it takes you looking at gaming and the story in a different way. There are a number of terms and interlocking pieces here you need to understand to get the most out of the game. You need to let go of your fear of spending "precious" fate points, and accept the fact you will be playing against your own best interest (in the short term) in order to get fate points back. You need to abandon some of the learned behaviors that traditional pen-and-paper games train you in, like some weapons being better than others, stat building, or min-maxing.

We had one player looking at their character and wishing they could be more than a single-purpose combat expert, that he had some social and technical skills when the situation called for a different approach and their influence wasn't as powerful. The player made up for it by spending fate points, playing smart, and steering the situation back towards what his character was good at - but still, that feeling 'you need to be good at many things' stayed with us. Also, that feeling of 'move the story to where it can be affected by your character the most' also became a tactic, and the bluffing and poker game began between players when they each tried to steer things their way.

But understanding the story-related aspects is key here, and letting each player have that 'ah-ha' moment where they realize the story-shifting parts of the rules are the most important parts of the game. Boosts, stunts, free uses of aspects, triggering them, creating them, and shifting the narrative playing field is where this game shines. If you play this as Basic D&D looking to see what's in the next encounter key you are not going to have as much fun, because you will limit your exposure to the best parts of the game with limited in-the-box thinking.

The more you understand and master the story-based aspects of the rules and how they are used, the more fun you will have with FATE.

Yes, we are Coming back to This One

We are planning a regular weekly game with this rules set, which is a rare thing. It is rare to find a game like this, that allows a high amount of energy to be directed into the game session from all of the players, and for pure chaos to send the story down a path nobody expected. That is the magic of roleplaying to us, not the stat-crunching or MMO simulation a lot of modern games get into, but the free form, 'we gather together to tell a story' thing that makes us feel like we are sitting around a campfire and kicking back with old friends.

FATE cerebrates the narrative. It gives everyone a chance to tell their part of the story. It gets this whole 'shared storytelling' thing that attracted us to the hobby long ago. Nicely done.

Great Article: 15 Key Differences Between Starfinder and Pathfinder

Check this out:

https://geekdad.com/2017/08/15-key-differences-between-starfinder-and-pathfinder-rpgs/

...a great article on the differences between Pathfinder and Starfinder. This goes into a lot of great technical and rules info so it is a handy one to reference and link to Pathfinder players who may be thinking about making the jump.

We received Starfinder last week, and I want to post some thoughts on it soon.

Great Article: ‘D&D BEYOND’...

Check this out:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/inside-dungeons-and-dragons-beyond/

This is an article about the new digital tools suite for D&D 5 and it looks pretty slick. I have HeroLab for Pathfinder, and that program has become the only way to play for us. I want to check this software suite out and see what it can do for my group - so, nicely done and written - thank you!

Now, my thoughts and feelings. The problem I have with both Pathfinder and D&D is the character generation time, even in the article, they mention it took a GM and seven players three hours to create a party of characters. Even the author says it takes him 30 to 45 minutes to create a character by himself, and that is with proficient rules knowledge.

And here I was thinking Pathfinder was the one that took a lot of time, and that D&D 5 was actually faster. I guess as time goes on, those 'critical path' choices become clear and the game's balance and mechanics push players more towards 'good choices' for combat and critical game activities. It is like hard drive space in a way, you always find a way to use it all up no matter how much you have. In pen-and-paper games, character generation time seems to go up to an hour no matter how hard the designers try to streamline.

I have been through those 'where did the three hours go' character generation sessions way too many times, and it is hard to get players to go through that and come back the next week. In my feeling, it throws a huge wet blanket over that first, magical 'getting started' session that should be about adventure and having fun, not filling out a character sheet the length of a tax form and then having to come back the next week to see if you made the right choices.

Yes, pre-generated characters help - but they take the critical 'player creative input' out of the game. We are in an age of 64-bit smartphones that do amazing things and connect the world, how hard could it be to design a rules system that gets you started in 5 minutes?

In a perfect world, I would never use a computer program to wrangle complex character creation systems, and it could all be done as we did it when the game started. Throw 3d6 in six scores, pick a race, pick a class, grab some gear, and go.

The simplicity of the retro-clones calls to me, I know.

But the new games allow so much customization!

True, but unlimited choice is not always a good thing in games nor in life. It can paralyze and cause people to not choose anything rather than make a choice and go with it. I would rather have my complexity creep in after level one (in character advancement) than force it on players before they get started with the game.

Just my feelings of course, and I still appreciate robust character design systems - but there is a point where I feel complexity starts hurting the 'new player experience' and also play-ability.

It is why my shelf still holds a nice collection of retro-clones and they continue to inspire me to this day. Sometimes the original ways we did things need some respect and study, and that those simple times had a merit of their own.

Mail Room: Blue Rose RPG

Look what came in the mail today, the Kickstarter version of the Blue Rose RPG. The book is too beautiful to open, so I am using the PDF to learn the rules. I know, it sucks when a game comes and the darn thing is too pretty to open up and use. I am a fan of the old three-ring bound D&D books that were meant to be snapped into a Trapper Keeper in middle school and smuggled into lunch room dungeon sessions. To further accentuate the point:

The sides of the pages are gold-leaf color. Nope, damn it, too pretty to use as a gaming book and I will more likely print out the first hundred or so pages of rules of the PDF so I can learn them and have something I can fold, bend, scribble on, and hand to grubby players. Or she better be wearing white lace gloves with this for me to hand it over.

The book even has a little cloth bookmark built into the book, so that is a cool extra touch.

It looks to be a fun game with rules that won't scare off people, and it also has some fun mechanics where the corruption of the world directly is responsible for some of the monsters there. Does the mayor have a dark secret? If so, watch out, as the inherent corruption of the world may overcome the poor soul and turn him into an evil NPC, or worse into a lich. It is admittedly cool stuff, and I like to see world-specific mechanics integrated into the rules like this.

The only downside to this game is that it isn't D&D or Pathfinder. That is also an upside as well, given the group. It uses the AGE system as seen in the Dragon Age RPG, so it shall be familiar to some, which helps get a group interested. Some may see the 'romantic' theme of this game as possibly a bit silly, but I really don't care - we could stand to see some fun and interesting themed RPGs on our shelf these days. There should be something for everybody, and I am happy tabletop gaming is getting a bit diverse in the experiences we can share with groups.

More soon as we check things out.

200 Multi Color d6

I don't know what it is about multi-color dice and me, but here I am loving this set of 200 (that is a lot) dice I picked up recently. Two-hundred dice is a lot, well, maybe it is not a lot if you are considering playing the new Tunnels and Trolls RPG, but there is something to having a big bucket of these and digging in to grab some for a roll. I don't need this many dice, but they are fun to play with, stack, stick your hand in, and pick a set of fresh ones out for each roll.

I like the colors too, when I am refereeing there is something very quick about having that color recognition going on in addition to the pattern recognition. Do our eyes recognize colors or patterns first? I would think colors, since maybe there is less brain activity needed to see a color than a pattern, though there are studies saying babies take several weeks to see their first color - but they can see light and dark before that (which would suggest patterns). But I like the color recognition, and it helps me sort the dice quickly.

I am trying to find some sort of standard for pip coloring, but there doesn't seem to be one - maybe. I have at least three sets here with different standards, so pick a brand and stick with it if you go colored pips. I do prefer the hotter, green yellows and reds to be the low numbers, while the cooler blues, purples and blacks are up at the high numbers.

These are also standard board-game sized dice, but they also sell the smaller 16mm type dice, with this set below (which I also like a lot):

You can see on this set the 4's are green while the 2's are yellow, when in the above the 4's are blue and the 2's are green. This set actually sticks to my color preferences better, but that is a minor point - once you get used to a set the color matching takes over in your head and it matters less. The edges of these are rounded, so they tend to roll a bit more versus board-game dice. These I can't "place" a roll on a table as well as I can dice with squarer sides. If I am playing a complex game where stray dice can knock pieces over, I will use dice that do not roll around as much.

Overall though, I love these dice and love using them at the table to speed up play. With either set you can't go wrong.

Elitism and Hardcore Play

http://kotaku.com/i-cant-stand-overwatchs-quick-play-anymore-1794721206

I stumbled across this article about Overwatch team balance and how there has developed an entire roster of 'less desirable' characters. And them "meta" which is the current play-style intended to maximize the chances of winning. An example of that? this is a good one:

http://www.dorkly.com/post/82360/overwatch-characters-ranked-from-best-to-worst

And then I got to thinking of Pathfinder and character builds. I run a game where "you play what you want" and if you pick some non-optimized, my-favorite, sort of 'free love' build where you are a fan of a non-optimal class - you can play that. I will adjust the adventure so you have a chance to shine, like if you want to play a shape-shifting druid and have a chance to make your animal form matter in the adventure. Things will be cool. Build what you want. I can adjust.

It is the power-gamers that I have more of a problem with, to be honest. Especially in a group comprised of new and experienced players. You know, the ones who come in expecting to do MAX DPS and build a character off a forum post, and then have their character swagger in with the PWN-age confidence of that same forum post into my world.

I can do 250 hit points of damage per turn with this build!

My first reaction, as a dungeon master, to that sort of attitude is to knock them down a little. I am sorry, I just can't stand it, and I am probably a worse DM for feeling and saying that. In a pen-and-paper game, I can find a million ways to kill off a single-trick pony build, because the character build is typically only good at one thing.

Sure, your mage or archer or whatever can do sick amounts of damage, and then the evil gnome living in the back of my dungeon master's mind is going to say, "hit them with a poison trap behind an illusion, and then drop in a monster into the party's rear rank where LoS is going to be blocked."

And a part of me hates that feeling of playing against some of the players. I really do because it is ultimately unfair and targets someone for their rules knowledge or design skills (versus the rest of the group). But if I present everything as a straight up fight to a group of mew-players and min-max'ers, you know what is going to happen. The min-max'ers are going to absolutely own the encounter, that archer is going to finish off the encounter in two or three turns, and the rest of the party will be sitting there feeling the following:

• My character sucks
• I could not contribute

I love min-max'ing too myself in games, especially in video games where there isn't other people to upset - just the computer and me, But when there is other people involved, I get this feeling that min-max'ing is just being selfish and hurts the group more than it does the monsters. As a player in a group, I would rather design a well-rounded character when I play with others, especailly in a group of new players. I don't want to show off or outshine them, because all that does is make them feel bad and make me look good. I feel selfish when my character blows through the encounter and the other players are all sitting there wondering why their characters couldn't contribute.

Hardcore Play

There is a special case when you get a group of players that are entirely min-maxers, and you get into this death-match mentality with them that (as a DM) I find as a different level of enjoyment. If they are all min-max-ing - then all bets are off. I am going to find a weakness in your defenses and exploit it, because that is what you are trying to do to my adventure. And that is what, frankly, is what a player rolling a min-max'ed character is going to expect.

As a min-max'er myself, at times, I want to be challenged. I want my build's weaknesses exposed and take advantage of. I want my 'perfect build' to fail spectacularly against the evil dungeon master. I want it tough, and I am betting my character can survive your worst. As a player, I love that feeling, and it is a thrill to me.

There is, and I am not ashamed to say this, a fun in that style of play. Using the rules to your advantage. Knowing a rule better than the DM, and then as a DM, admitting defeat and saying "I have learned something," letting the player have that victory, and getting on with the next encounter. You know, really hardcore, competitive play that absolutely uses 100% of the rules to their limit, deadly traps, unfair encounters, the rules matter, and seat-of-your pants play.

And then smiling and thanking the players for dropping by today, and realizing we all love this hobby so much that we appreciate every chance we get to play together. Even in the "hardcore" style of play I like sometimes where players and the DM are in this hyper-competitive state, I like the thrill and the competition of the game. I want new players, if they so choose, to be able to join us in that elite club.

But not an elitist club.

If you played Warhammer Fantasy Battle or 40K competitively you know what I mean. There is this expectation, "When you come to the table, bring it." A good opponent with a great army is hard to find, and it is a joy playing against them. Someone who knows the rules well is a treat to fight, and especially one who takes the time to explain things to a newer player - despite the match taking longer than it should. I respect those players and love fighting them, since they bring out the best in me. My best build, my best sportsmanship, and the best fights on the table no matter who wins or loses.

But I feel there is a time to tone it down.

With new players at the table just looking to experience an adventure, I can shift gears and adjust to casual play. A good min-max player can sense this too and relax, build a whatever never-tried before fantasy character, and have fun as well in that setting. It is the players who continue to min-max in a mixed casual-hardcore group like that, who have no sense of toning it down, who tend to get on my nerves. Sometimes we are all here to have fun and not try to outwit each other, because we have some people playing that don't know the game as well. Chill. Tone it down. Have fun and play something you never would.

Maybe some of those new players will start to get the itch, and want to play in a hardcore game. We can move them up to that level later, and foster another elite player out of them. Welcome to the club, and I will do my best to challenge you.